Oblique view of Lake Tahoe, CA-NV showing a debris avalanche

Oblique view of Lake Tahoe shaded-relief bathymetry looking west towards Tahoe Park. The distance across the bottom of the image is approximately 8.5 km. The image has a vertical exaggeration of 3 times the horizontal distance. The colored region is the lake floor, while the gray-scale region is the surrounding land. This central part of the western margin has collapsed sometime in the past, sending very large blocks scattering out across the floor of the lake. The debris tongue is 7.5 km wide and 9 km long. The thin distal area is about 15 m thick and the large blocks within the debris tongue are up to 20 m high. The vertical extent of the failure is 200 m (1635 m to 1435 m elevation). A large failure such as this is called a debris avalanche and is very similar in size to similar collapse features found along ocean margins in tectonically active areas and on volcanoes. See view 5 for a different view of this debris avalanche.